Cigars, Beer, and Jimi Hendrix

I'm a big fan of acquired tastes. I like whiskey, wine, beer, and cigars. I absolutely love coffee. I spent a couple of years in college developing a taste for Jazz. (I especially like the modal Cool Jazz of the late 50s, by the way.) I go out of my way to taste Asian and European cuisine, and for the most part I like it.

I've found that there's two types of tastes -- things that are immediately good and always good -- sugar, for instance. There's no one out there that can honestly say they don't like sugar. Too much sugar, of course, is bad, and a lot of people can't handle tastes that are too rich, but deep down, everyone likes sugar. Then there's these "acquired" tastes. Things that initially might make you wince when you taste it. Something that's just too far outside of your experience to taste good, but you know lots of people that like it.

These acquired tastes are more exotic, complex, subtle, and inconsistent. Every coffee drinker has had amazing cups of coffee, and they've all had immensely bitter or weak or too damn strong cups too. Why bother? If something tastes good the very first time you have it -- a vanilla milkshake or cherry lime-aid, why on earth work on those things that -- well, take work? Why drink coffee or beer? Why listen to Jazz? Or for that matter -- Wilco?

Because when it's good an acquired taste is so much better than the easy tastes, and when it's not, it's still pretty good. The joy of a great cup of coffee far, far outstrips the almost prosaic sweetness of a Coca-Cola. I mean, I like a Coke here and there (or did before I gave up caffeine... sigh), but it just doesn't compare to a latte skillfully made. Nor does a store-bought beer ever compare with a well-made home-brew. It's like having your Mom's meatloaf, cooked with love and years of know-how, versus ordering meatloaf at Boston Market. The same ingredients go in, mostly, but the care involved in preparing it, tasting it, making sure it's "just right" makes all the difference. Taking the risk and having it pay off is worth the occasional bad cup of joe.

Music is the same way. Sometimes in my musical journeys I come across a particular artist again and again, but yet I just don't get it when I listen to them. It's not that the band isn't great, or the music moving, it's just that at that point in time my ears just don't have the context to hear the music as it should be heard. It's too far outside of my experience.

Listen to this -- this is important. What we like in music doesn't have anything to do with the music itself. The music itself is completely objective. It's our experience that makes our appreciation of the music. It's completely subjective. Music has to sound different enough from what we've heard in the past so that we don't find it trite, boring, or repetitive, but yet it has to be just near enough to what we've heard in the past to be able to comprehend it.

Being outside of our context gives rise to the "that music all sounds the same" phenomenon. All you can hear when a musical genre is outside of your experience is the genre. It's always this way -- old time, rap, grunge, Bluegrass, vomit-metal. If you don't know the genre, you can't get the individual artists.

As an example, when I was in high school, I was really into grunge music and before that heavy metal. Reading magazines and watching TV I kept hearing about this Jimi Hendrix dude. I kept hearing that he was the Shit with a capital S. And I must have listened to him a hundred times, always not getting it. When I was working in a music store in high school I had one co-worker, a great guitarist in his own right, shove Jimi so far down my throat that at one point I just yelled him -- "I *hate* Jimi Hendrix."

Now friends, I was 16 or 17, and I didn't know shit. Not long after that I had finally absorbed enough Blues and Sixties music to finally come to grips with Jimi and respect him for the Patron Saint of Blues & Rock that he is. But my point here is that people have different tastes at different times.

So all this time I've felt it's our job, nay our duty, to shove our musical tastes down your throat here at HickoryWind.org. I hope that by talking about artists enough, you'll go out and listen to them for yourself. I hope that you'll acquire that taste.

But now here's the rub -- how exactly do you go about that? I mean, a true artist is a complex creature, and their career has its ups and downs. What if you buy the wrong CD? What if you start at the beginning when you should've started at the end? What's to keep you from wasting those hard-earned CD dollars?

Well, here again, we're here to help. I've been wanting to do this for a long while, and I'm just now getting to it. I'm going to post some playlists that'll help ease you into Wilco. If you're a big Wilco fan, then these posts will give you lots of fodder to yell at me about. (Bring it on!) But if you're like I was the past couple of years -- knowing that somewhere in this mess of CDs there was good music but unaware of where to begin, trying to connect these musical dots -- well, I'm here to show you the way. Or at least -- my way. Here again, "Music Is Subjective". (I think I might get that tatooed on my ass or something.) I'm going to show you one path towards this music, but you've got to walk it yourself.

Alright, next post, Wilco 101: The Essentials.